Frequently asked questions

Do you have special plans for open source projects,
non-profits, groups of friends, and other non-commercial
entities?

Yes! Zulip Cloud Standard is free for open source
projects. We also offer steep discounts (usually
85%-100%) to many non-profits, educational
institutions, groups of friends, and in other
scenarios where most of the users are not fulltime
employees of the customer. Generally, only closed
organizations that also pay their members’
salaries pay full price. Just contact
sales@zulipchat.com and we’d be happy to
discuss your situation!

Yes! Some of our biggest fans have hundreds or thousands
of users, including Fortune 500 companies like Akamai,
and open source communities like
The
Recurse Center. If you’d like to see a large Zulip
in action, the
Zulip
community server has thousands of accounts and hundreds of weekly active users, and is run on a single machine with 8GB of RAM.

Can I pay by credit card and/or invoice?

You can always use a credit card to pay, and we can bill
by invoice for amounts over $1000.

Can I start on Zulip Cloud and later move to On-Premise?

Yes! Our high quality export and import tools
(cloud,
on-premise) ensure you can always move
from our hosting to yours (and back). If
you’d like to do a migration, email
support@zulipchat.com and we’ll get you started!

How are guest users billed?

Guests cannot see or join streams they are not invited
to. Guests subscribed to more than 1 stream are billed
like regular users. Guests subscribed to a single stream
are generally free, unless you have more than 5 times as
many single-stream guests as paying users. More details
are available here.

How does the free plan message limit work?

Only the most recent 10,000 messages can be viewed
and searched with Zulip Free. Older messages are
still stored and will become available again
should the organization purchase a paid plan or
get Zulip Cloud Standard free because they are an
open source project or similar organization.

Who can I contact if I have further questions?

Stop by the
Zulip
community server to see Zulip in action and chat
with the developers,
tweet @zulip, or
shoot us an email at sales@zulipchat.com!

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Feature

Zulip

Slack

Mattermost

Discord

Apps for every platform

Hundreds of integrations

Hosting available

Emoji reactions

Markdown formatting

Topic-based threading

Lightning-fast search

Free and open source

Open Core *

* Mattermost Team is open source, but many features
are only available in their proprietary version,
Mattermost Enterprise.